Connor Corum, LEFT, and Greg Kinnear in TriStar Pictures' HEAVEN IS FOR REAL.

Connor Corum, LEFT, and Greg Kinnear in TriStar Pictures' HEAVEN IS FOR REAL.

Photo: Allen Fraser

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Todd (Greg Kinnear) shows Colton (Connor Corum) a picture of 'Pops' his grandfather in TriStar Pictures' HEAVEN IS FOR REAL.

Todd (Greg Kinnear) shows Colton (Connor Corum) a picture of 'Pops' his grandfather in TriStar Pictures' HEAVEN IS FOR REAL.

Photo: Allen Fraser

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Connor Corum, left, and Greg Kinnear star in "Heaven Is for Real."

Connor Corum, left, and Greg Kinnear star in "Heaven Is for Real."

Photo: Allen Fraser, HOEP

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Thomas Haden Church in TriStar Pictures' HEAVEN IS FOR REAL.'

Thomas Haden Church in TriStar Pictures' HEAVEN IS FOR REAL.'

Photo: Allen Fraser

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Tiny Texas movie theater asks Web for help to stay alive in digital world

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A one-screen movie theater in Hempstead is fighting to stay alive and hopes that a Kickstarter campaign can help them pay for an upgrade to digital projection, because film is quickly going away.

Movie studios are abandoning physical film reels for digital projection systems, which deliver films to theater via download or hard drive. Now, some smaller theaters are feeling the hurt in their pocketbook to pay for the upgrade. Where some large theater chains can afford to upgrade to new digital systems, privately owned theaters like this one are struggling to keep up.

Owner and operator Tina Fehrenbach says making her 200-seat Hempstead Theater digital is a necessity for keeping the doors open.

"The theater needs $85,000 to be fully upgraded with the newest digital projection system, a new screen, and overall just revamping the location, which is stuck in the 1970s," she says. That's why she started the Kickstarter campaign this week.

She would also like to also install a stage in front of the screen in the hope that it could be used for live theater events.

The theater has been a family-run mainstay of Hempstead life since the 1920s, Fehrenbach said. Hers is the fifth family to run it over the decades since it opened.

Her entire family has worked at the theater since they acquired it six years ago. Her daughter started working the candy booth when she was just 6.

The closest theaters to Hempstead are The Showboat, a drive-in where you can see two movies for $5, and the Westwood Cinema 6 in Brenham about 30 minutes away, so entertainment options for the small town are limited.

Fehrenbach, 49, has been going to the theater since she was a child. The first movie she can remember seeing there was Jaws. She was scared of the killer shark and ended up hanging out at the concession stand with employees.

"The move to digital is also hampering what we can bring to the town," Fehrenbach said. Some studios are only striking a limited amount of film versions of their movies, so sometimes Hempstead has to wait weeks to get new movies on their screen. This is hurting the theater, which prided itself for years on being a first-run theater.

Patrick Corcoran, spokesman for the National Association of Theatre Owners, said there about 800 theaters across the county that haven't converted yet.

"Right now, about 94 percent of the screens have been converted in 85 percent of theaters," Corcoran said Friday. "Some are bigger chains and some are smaller chains. The bigger chains may just be waiting for their lease to be up and not planning to upgrade."

Corcoran said Paramount stopped shipping 35mm film after Anchorman 2 was released last year. Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street was the first film that Paramount released entirely digitally, with no film print at all. There is no firm date for when all studios will stop releasing movies on film, although Corcoran said it's getting more expensive to do so.

"All of them are doing limited numbers of film print on wide release and there will still be some film prints available, but studios are looking at the economics of it," he said.

Fehrenbach said the National Association of Theatre Owners offers help to theaters that need to upgrade, but they must gross at least $200,00 a year to get that help.

"We do maybe $100,000 to $125,000 a year. Basically they said that if you can't go digital that they can't help you," she said. The theater charges $6 per person for movies and $4 for matinees. Family movies do the best in the small town, she said.

Going digital would allow them to do many more things with the space, like bringing in older movies for retrospectives, or showing TV and sporting events with the right permissions. Digital means that she can start showing 3-D flicks as well.

The price is prohibitive for some theaters, Corcoran admits.

"It can be about $70,000 per screen but that varies by the size of the booth it is installed in," he says. It's essentially a computer and projector in one, and it has to be kept cool to prevent overheating. Movies can be delivered to the theater either by downloading them from an encrypted server or a hard drive that is mailed to the theater.

Make no mistake, it can get pricy for small theaters to head into the 21st century.

"Just the projectors cost $155,000, which included installation, but we also upgraded our sound system, which was about $195,000," says Gerry Couey, who has owned the Showplace 3 in El Campo for over 30 years. They opened with Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Romancing The Stone, and Footloose.

He said faith-based movies are helping smaller theaters survive in 2014.

"Religious movies are bringing out a different crowd for us and those movies have longer legs at the box office," Couey says. "Heaven Is For Real has been showing for three weeks now."

So far, the Hempstead Theater Kickstarter has raised $1,250 toward its $85,000 goal.